The beginning of the Russians' settling in Pribaikalye is closely connected with the exploration of
the taiga zone. At that stage trade and industry were mostly characteristic of the colonization. The
major migrations to Siberia were represented by North Russian peasants. The Russian people developed
here integrated economy based on a combination of crop-growing and stock-breeding alongside
hunting, fishing, carrier's trade and nut-gathering.

Subsequently the Russians' settling was definitely influenced by the construction of
the Moscow highway (1760) and the Trans-Siberian Railway (finished in 1898), and also
Stolypin's agrarian reform (1906). Thus, new villages quickly sprang up along the roads.

The first Russians discovered in Siberia

the lands originally inhabited by a great
number of families and tribes that had not formed a nation yet. The tribes had totem
names of a bird or an animal. They differed from each other in their economic activity:
some of them engaged in hunting, others in fishing, the third did both. There were such
societies already, mostly in southern regions where they had both stock-breeding and
crop-growing.

In Pribaikalye the Buryat ethnos had completely formed only by the end of the 19th and
the beginning of the 20th century.

In the 19th - 20th century, the taiga and mountain taiga regions, adjacent to Baikal
were widely inhabited by the Evenk people. The discoveries of archaeologists,
investigations of anthropologists, linguists and ethnographers make it possible to
consider the Evenks the most ancient settlers of the Eastern Siberia taiga zone.